Linux® For Dummies®, 8th Edition

Listening to Internet Radio

Listening to Internet radio is, for the most part, a snap in Linux, unless you want to listen to streams that are in Windows formats (see Chapter 15 for software you can purchase to solve this problem). The software options most people choose in general for Internet radio in Linux are RealPlayer, Amarok, and Mplayer (for Windows formats, for more about Mplayer see Chapter 14). Chapter 16 discusses how to install RealPlayer. The rest of this section focuses on playing streaming audio (Internet Radio) in Amarok. For more on Amarok, see the previous section.

Mplayer is of questionable legality in North America and other places where intellectual property law and laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) make it tricky for open source programs to navigate the licensing maze when it comes to music formats. For more on the DMCA and the problems it causes, see www.anti-dmca.org.

To find the preprogrammed stations in Amarok, select the Playlists tab and look under Radio Streams. Both the Cool-Streams and Shoutcast Streams sections have many selections to choose from. To add a new station to the list:

1.	Click Add. A drop down list appears.
2.	Select Radio Stream. The Add Radio Stream dialog box appears.
3.	Enter the name for the stream in the Name text box.
4.	Enter the URL for the stream in the Url text box.
5.	Click OK to add the stream to ...